In this paper we argue that the conventional explanation for this decline namely high legacy labor and health care costs is seriously incomplete and that GM s share collapsed for many of the same reasons that many of the other highly successful American firms of the s s and s were forced from the market including a failure to understand the nature of the competition they faced and an inability to respond effectively once they did. We focus particularly on the problems.
GM encountered in developing the relational contracts essential to modern design and manufacturing. We discuss a number of possible causes for these difficulties including GM s historical practice of treating both its suppliers and its blue collar workforce as homogeneous interchangeable Chinese Overseas America Number Data entities as well as its view that expertise could be partitioned so that there was minimal overlap of knowledge amongst functions or levels in the organizational hierarchy and decisions could be made using well defined financial criteria. We suggest that this dynamic may have important implications for our understanding of the role of management in the modern knowledge based firm and for the potential revival of manufacturing in the United States.
Publisher s link hbs faculty Pages download.aspx name .pdf pdf SEPTEMBER MANAGING CONSUMER SERVICES FACTORY OR THEATER Customer Experience and Service Design By Karmarkar Uday and Uma R. Karmarkar ABSTRACT—activity in all major economies in the world there has been curiously little investigation into many aspects of service management. For example while product design and development have received a great deal of attention the subject of service design has not been very visible in the research literature. There are many individual designers and design firms famous for their contributions to product design but the same cannot be said for services.